Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
Ruby leads editorial, operations and initiatives at Newschecker. In her former avatar at New Delhi Television (NDTV), India’s leading national news network, she was a news anchor, supervising producer and senior output editor. Her over a decade-long career encompasses ground-breaking reportage from conflict zones and reporting on terror incidents, election campaigns, and gender issues. Ruby is an Emmy-nominated producer and has handled both local and international assignments, including the coverage of Arab Spring in 2011, the US Presidential elections in 2016, and ground reportage on the Kashmir issue since 2009.
Claim
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is offering “three months free recharge” so that more people can vote for BJP in the 2024 general elections.
We received this claim on our Whatsapp tipline (9999499044), requesting us to fact-check it.
Fact
We started by inspecting the link provided in the Whatsapp forward, which brought us to a website, stating “BJP Free Recharge Yojana”, and another link, “Get Free Recharge”, that asks us for our number.
Screengrab of the “BJP Free Recharge Yojana” website
The URL, https://www.bjp.org@bjp2024.mangafinic.com/, raised our doubts as the BJP’s official website address reads, https://www.bjp.org/.
We next ran a keyword search for “BJP free recharge yojana”, which did not lead us to any credible news reports or official statements of such a scheme. We looked up the BJP’s official website for the scheme, which, again, did not throw up any relevant results.
Newschecker learnt that the “mangafinic.com” website was found to be suspicious and marked “Doubtful. Medium-Risk. Alert” by Scam Detector, a major fraud prevention resource.
Screengrab of Scam Detector’s report on mangafinic.com.
“The first one [parameter] that we look at is the “Proximity to suspicious websites” tab. What does that mean exactly? It means that, unfortunately, through either its servers, IP address or other online connections, mangafinic.com has an association – on a range from 1 to 100 – to sites that have been flagged as malicious. The higher the number is, the higher the proximity to these controversial websites is – so, the higher, the worse,” read the scam detector’s review.
We have reached out to cybersecurity experts and will update this article once we receive a response.
Result: False
Sources
Analysis
Scam detector review
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Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
Ruby leads editorial, operations and initiatives at Newschecker. In her former avatar at New Delhi Television (NDTV), India’s leading national news network, she was a news anchor, supervising producer and senior output editor. Her over a decade-long career encompasses ground-breaking reportage from conflict zones and reporting on terror incidents, election campaigns, and gender issues. Ruby is an Emmy-nominated producer and has handled both local and international assignments, including the coverage of Arab Spring in 2011, the US Presidential elections in 2016, and ground reportage on the Kashmir issue since 2009.
